Sense making mandates attention not only to the material embodiment of knowing, but to the emotional/feeling framings of knowing as well. Sense making assumes that the entire human package – body, mind, heart, soul – is simultaneously verbed, constantly evolving and becoming, and intricately intertwined
-Brenda Dervin
Dear traveler,
I’ve cried in transit quite a few times, walking from one place to the next. Not on purpose. The tears were automatic, unstoppable. We laugh in public frequently and without thought. Along the BeltLine, I laugh because I hear the jokes of others. I laugh at the clumsiness of toddlers. We rarely, though, have the opportunity to share in a stranger's sadness.
Can you tell me about a time when you had a big emotion while in transit?
Yours,
aa
on letter writing
August 16, 2022
In 2017, I was fortunate to get a scholarship to spend two weeks at The Hambidge Center and develop a work that was eventually called sanctuaries and fortresses. I had lofty ideas about the educational aspects of the work, including an interactive website where students could learn various facets of performance-making - costume design, production management, choreography development. None of that happened and I’ve since learned that taking small steps towards a big goal usually proves more fruitful than taking one big leap past the details that make up a complex machine. Either way, on the 5th or 6th day of the residency, I walked to the edge of Hambidge's long driveway for no reason known to me and decided to look in the mailbox. There was a single letter. It was from my dad.
I had no idea he had written me a letter. He didn’t tell me. Hambidge is not that far from my parent’s house (relatively, it’s about 2 hours, I guess). And I wasn’t going to be gone long. But he chose to write to me, maybe because he knew there’d be limited phone service on Hambidge’s campus and maybe because he wanted to make sure I wasn’t feeling alone. The memory grabs at my chest and gut. I was so happy.
In the mid 1980s, I think, my dad wrote my sister, who had just been adopted by my grandma, a letter to check in on her needs and to tell her he missed her. Tiffany was still a small child, she was born in 1979, and the situation leading to her adoption was traumatic. I found the letter when I was going through her bills and records after her death in June. I’m not sure where my dad’s affinity for letter writing came from and I didn’t see him do it much but these two instances are particular, emotional. Both brought about by a depth of love for, and constant thinking about one’s children I hope to learn one day.
As an archivist, I’ve spent hours with the letters of people who contribute their collections by donation or by law to academic institutions in the American South. In North Carolina, while processing the Carolina Performing Arts collection, most of the letters (printed emails) I encountered were business oriented and involved the scheduling and managing of an artist's visit to UNC’s campus. They were massively interesting and gave little bits of insight into what it’s like to program renowned performance seasons with (what feels like to me) huge budgets. At Emory, I’ve had the pleasure, and I mean pleasure, of reading personal letters between Carmen de Lavallade and Geoffrey Holder. Letters to Geoffrey Holder from listeners of his radio program. Letters from Janet Collins. I couldn’t spend too much time reading them, but it was hard not to.
My interest in writing letters, along with a comment from Miranda during one of our first meetings, informed one of the methods of collecting information for this research. gaze , time-travel, and the unknown is given life through the letters of Mary Grace Allerdice, Jessica Caldas, Danielle Deadwyler, Bella Dorado, Brianna Heath, Angela Davis Johnson, and Nadya Zeitlin. These 7 artists agreed to correspond with me about their work and life and sent between 1 and 5 letters in response to questions and musings we worked through together. I sent the first one in January of 2022 and received a letter back from most artists by March 2022. Letter writing, in this context, was performance. The intention of writing letters was to infuse “the document”, “the archive” with a sensuality, a sense of movement and embodiment, because any method of collecting data in this project would need to be close enough to it’s subject to be able to describe it. I’ve learned that letter writing inspires a deep listening and attention to the place and space around you. By practicing the deep listening required of writing and reading a letter, the artists and I were engaging in what is a central tenet in site-specific performance specifically and performance in general. Deep listening, a phrase I first heard from Lauri Stallings as a social movement artist with gloATL, catalyzes the sensitive, thoughtful public art works created by the 7 artists above.
Letter writing spanned over the course of 4 months. From Nadya I received drawings and ephemera in the form of her oldest daughter’s school assignments, renderings of jellyfish by her youngest daughter, and pages of letters written on Nadya’s rehearsal notes. She drew sites, like a boxing ring or a tall building, a reflection of her clarity and sharp eye towards dynamic spatial orientations. She also made unusual folds and crossed out some words that she wrote “were just for fun.” A sense of playfulness and experimentation was evident in her writing and the material she chose to send me.
In a testament to and an experimentation with the fluidity of “monument,” Danielle wrote her letters atop of mine. Artfully squeezing words and sentences between the curves of my y’s and j’s. She annotated the sides and backs of letters as if they were a favorite book or a reference for some poetry or choreo-play she’d create in the future. Eventually the first letter was squeezed to the max. And in response to her musings about the monument that is a letter, or a book, I turned our letters into a bound book. It was, to me, a test of risking “loss” of information and an experiment with how far trusting the power of ephemerality could take us.
The play with public and private is evident to me in the above examples and in the experience of reading a letter in an archive. The people who did not donate ____ collection to the big private university did not consent to having their letters read by strangers like me and the researchers who now have access to the collection. I got a glimpse into Nadya’s home and relationship with her daughters through her letters. She allowed that for me, which requires trust. Within each artist's practice, there is a level of trust in sharing autobiographical stories through abstraction, to an audience.
There are more examples of the gifts these artists shared with me in the form of their intimacy and trust that I won’t elaborate on for now. But I found that the letter-writing aspects of this research were some of the most rewarding and the most surprisingly kin to performance.
Letters in Transit
photographs by Crystal Monds
a bike ride through Melwood cemetery, near the Stone Mountain Trail in Clarkston, Georgia